which is all the more credible as the trochaic metre chosen is very easy. The meaning of single lines is often as vague as the structure of the whole is loose. What does it mean exactly?— Emicant lacrimæ tumentes de caduco pondere

Gutta præceps arvo parvo sustinet casus suos.

The poet, or the poets, clearly mean that the dewdrop is just ready to fall, and still lingers on the bud; but does the second line mean anything that is not said in the first? And what is meant by a rose putting on the bridal veil? especially as we learn directly afterwards that " Cypris, fashioned of blood and of love's kisses and jewels and flames and the purple of the sun, will deign as a wife may to-morrow to unloose from its one knot the rosy blush which lay hid behind the veil of flamecolor;" or what does it mean when the poet bids "Hybla burst the vesture of the flowers through all the plains of Henna?" After this it is comparatively a trifle that the preposition de is far on the way to acquire the sense that it has in French, and that we come on a phrase like De tenente, which has no analogy in the language of the best authors ; for a language has a right to change, but no writer ought to be vague. It is also an abuse of poetical license to represent a wood coming into leaf after the spring rains, as "loosening its locks in the bridal of the showers." The full-grown foliage may possibly be accepted as waving locks which rustle in the wind; but locks must be there before they can be loosed; and the leaves are not there even when they are in the bud. The short imitation of the lecture on the Soul of the World in the Sixth Æneid is stately and glowing; but the real charm of the poem is a soft glow of feeling, which atones for defective meaning as exquisite coloring in a picture atones for defective drawing.

CHAPTER III.

AULUS GELLIUS.

AULUS GELLIUS, a contemporary of Apuleius, who probably belonged to a slightly later generation, only comes in contact with the African school as one of the numerous hearers of Fronto; and Fronto nowhere names him, so that he cannot have been one of the most distinguished. He shares the literary tastes, but not the literary aims, of his predecessor and contemporary; he is not a stylist, but an antiquary. He was a small official with a turn for reading, who, before he had grown absolutely old, resolved to publish his commonplace book; and, if his business and his duty to his children gave him leave, to continue it as long as he lived. Apparently he did not live long, for the commonplace book was not continued; we have only nineteen books of it, with the author's table of contents to twenty. It is the eighth book that is missing. The author, in his elaborate preface, rather plumes himself upon his modesty. He will not follow the example of those who have published their note-books under the title of "Forests," or "Muses," or "Broidered Robes," or "Cornucopiæ," or "Tablets," or "Meadows," or "My Reading," or "Ancient Readings," or "Anthology," or "Treasure Trove," or "Light on the Subject," or " Patchwork," or "Hotchpotch," or "Helicon or Problems," or Manuals," or "Stilettos." Some chose the title of "Memorials," or "Pragmatics," or "Incidental Notes," or "Teachers' Manual." Then we have "Natural History," "Miscellaneous History," and the "Meadow" or the "Fruitery." "The Dust-heap" is common enough, and a good many have thought "Moral Letters," or "Questions of Correspondence," or "A Medley of Questions," a good occasion for displaying a surprisingly pretty

wit. As for himself, Aulus Gellius decides upon what he thinks a very modest, homely title, " Attic Nights," because he began them in the long nights of a winter of Attica. He implies that he took less pains than most of his rivals to write prettily, and asserts plainly enough that he took more pains to write usefully. His boast is not confined to his preface. The sixth chapter of the fourteenth book is devoted to ridicule of the follies of contemporary compilers. "A man of our acquaintance, not undistinguished in the pursuit of letters, who had spent great part of his life over books, said, 'I wish to come to the help and improvement of those "Nights" of yours,' and therewith he gave me a book, and a big book, abounding, as he told me himself, with learning of all kinds, which he said he had worked out for himself out of a great deal of varied and out-of-the-way reading, so that I might extract from it as much as I pleased of things worth remembering." Of course Gellius accepted the book eagerly, but when he came to read it he was astonished and disappointed to find nothing but a blank appeal to curiosity. "What was the name of the first person called a grammarian? How many celebrated persons there had been of the name of Pythagoras? How many of the name of Hippocrates? What sort of gallery-door there was in the house of Ulysses, as described by Homer? Why, when Telemachus was lying close to Pisistratus, he roused him with his foot, and not with his hand? How did Euryclea shut up Telemachus? and how is it that the same poet mentions oil of roses and never mentions roses? Then, too, all the names of the companions of Ulysses whom Scylla pulled out of the ship and tore to pieces, were duly written down. There was a discussion whether the wanderings of Ulysses were in the inner sea according to Aristarchus, or the outer sea according to Crates. There, too, was written how many verses there are in Homer where the numerical value of the letters is the same in two lines running, and how many lines there are which fall into acrostics, and the lines where each word is a syllable longer than the line before; and what Homer can have been thinking of when he wrote that all the sheep yeaned three times a year; and whether the golden

plate in the shield of Achilles was the outside or the middle of the five plates of which the shield was made. Besides, there were all the cities and countries whose names have been altered hitherto; one learned that Boeotia used to be called Aonia, and Egypt Aeria, and Crete was called Aeria just like Egypt, and Attica was called Acte and Acta by a poet, and Corinth Ephyra, and Macedonia Emathia, and Thessaly Hæmonia, and Tyre Sarra, and Thrace used to be called Sithon, and Sestos Posidonium. There was all this, and a great deal more of the kind, in that book. So, returning the book with all possible haste, I said, 'I wish you joy, most learned of men, of all your miscellaneous learning. Here is your learning back; unluckily it don't suit my poverty-stricken writings at all. For my" Nights" that you went in for helping and adorning are all concerned with a single verse of Homer, which Socrates always said was what pleased him beyond everything—

The good and evil that you meet at home.""

In this temper it is natural that Gellius should have confined himself a good deal to compiling; and it is probable that his entire absence of pretension and his rejection of what was useless gave him the same kind of popularity in antiquity which he certainly enjoyed at the revival of letters. There are a great many MSS. of his works, and no old ones: the inference is that he was copied by everybody who could, from the fourteenth century onward, and he was reprinted a dozen times between 1469 and 1500.

In general it may be said that Gellius takes pains to be less petty than his contemporaries; that he is endeavoring to stretch grammar into a liberal education. He is always severe upon the tendency to specialize, and imagines that a really well-informed man ought to understand the whole of life; and, practically, he knows nothing but books, though resolute to make a sensible use of them. He marks a stage which always seems to be reached sooner or later, when books tend in ever-increasing measure to become the absorbing subject of pure literature. When his mind is quite at ease and at leisure (when he is in his litter, for instance, riding off to his

summer holiday), he naturally turns to a purely grammatical question, the different uses of pro, and decides, to his great comfort, that they can be explained upon a common principle, and yet are not absolutely identical. One notices the change in some fifty or sixty years from Pliny the Younger, who, when he was at leisure, had nothing to think of but the trivial epigrams which any accomplished nobleman might write when he was idle. He tells a pretty story of Domitius,' a learned grammarian who had a reputation at Rome, who was nicknamed the madman: he was by nature rather wilful and quarrelsome, and Gellius's friend Favorinus met him at the temple of Carmenta, and inquired whether contiones was the right Latin word for the Greek Anunyopia. Domitius thought that the world was undone if philosophers condescended to grammatical drudgery, and promised Favorinus a book which would answer his question, declining to do so himself because. he had higher aspirations. Favorinus remarked that only a man of genius could have been melancholy mad in such a way, and that the rude speech of the grammarian would have been quoted to his glory if he had been a professed philosopher; after which Gellius proceeds to copy some very dull notes from Verrius Flaccus, bearing vaguely upon the question of Favorinus. We have more reason to thank him for a little disquisition on the fashion set by the poets of lengthening ob and sub when compounded with jacere and its derivatives, whence we learn that in spontaneous pronunciation the modified i or i was not sounded at all, and that it was a positive solecism to sound the i in the first syllable of injicit long, even when the metre required it. Gellius hardly raised this point for himself." He was indebted to Favorinus for the conjecture that the distinction between præda and manubiæ lay in this, that præda was the booty itself, and manubia the money derived from it. Indeed, Favorinus seems almost to have deserved the rebuke of Domitius: he was a Gaul of

1 Gell. "Noct. Att." xviii. 7.

'He quotes Sulpicius Apollinaris, iv. 17, as having saved the metre by pronouncing the “i” in Obicibus ruptis (Georg. ii. 480) paullo largius ube• riusque i. q. obyicibus.